Another nostalgia posting. Some pictures of very old computing treasures from history.

Old AOL login window. Dialing up to an America Online system to get connected to the Internet. The old OS/2 Warp operating system from IBM. This was a very good operating system back in the day. Windows `95 on floppy disks. This would take a very long time to install compared to using a DVD … Read more

Westcliff High School for Girls Academy switches to OpenSUSE KDE desktops instead of Windows.

The Westcliff High School for Girls Academy has switched from Windows on their workstations to the KDE Plasma desktop. This means that they are avoiding the licensing hassles of using Windows and they are adopting a free and open operating system that will provide the students with a desktop environment reminiscent of Windows but with … Read more

Problems installing Ubuntu 13.04 and how punched cards worked in the olden days of computing.

You might have heard of the trouble I have had with the Ubuntu 13.04 Linux distribution, but if you have not then I will tell you what is going on. The Live DVD of Ubuntu 13.04 Gnome Edition will not install. I run the installer and get up to the point where you are selecting … Read more

Fedora Core 17 not polished enough and mobile computing revolution taking over from desktop computers?

I have abandoned the Fedora Core 17 distribution, the me-tv software is not available and I could not get the source code to compile. That program worked perfectly on Linux Mint 12, but when I installed the Linux Mint 13 distribution it would not work properly at all. Presently I have finished installing Ubuntu 11.04 … Read more

The old computers that led us into the computing revolution. The 10,000 dollar PDP-8.

This is the PDP-8 computer. This beast had 4 Kilobytes of RAM and was quite the purchase back in the day. You could program in FORTRAN on this machine, entering code with a teletype input. The more powerful PDP-9 had twice the RAM, 8 Kilobytes to be precise and cost only 35,000 dollars. But with … Read more

How computers are portrayed in movies and television.

The way that computer interfaces are portrayed in the movies and television shows has always been rather fanciful, with the computer users navigating a Graphical User Interface by typing madly on the keyboard. And the impossible CSI computers that can zoom into a 360p resolution video and see a persons face clearly, or a number … Read more

The machines that sparked the computer age. From Enigma to Colossus.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/technology/of-codebreakers-and-mechanical-giants-56949.html [theepochtimes.com] The world war was fought not just with bullets and artillery, but also with computers, creating and cracking even more complex codes that were beyond the human mind`s capability to break. The German Enigma machine was the machine that created the most complex code of the war, and had 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible code combinations, but allied researchers undoubtedly … Read more

Malicious crackers hit Gillard ministers’ computers.

The computers belonging to the Prime Minister Julia Gillard have been compromised in a coordinated cyber-attack by Chinese terrorist hackers. This on top of the incident where all Internet traffic for a time was re-routed through China allowing Chinese authorities to sort through sensitive western data. The computers that were cracked into had very simple … Read more